Unless you’re living under a rock, you’ll be aware that the man formerly known as Bruce Jenner is now a glamorous woman named Caitlyn.
A corset-clad Caitlyn Jenner, 65, appears on the cover of July’s Vanity Fair, and inside the magazine there’s a 22-page interview with stunning photos shot by Annie Leibovitz.
Jenner’s spoken about her impending transition before, but this is the first time she’s appeared post-transition — and it’s pretty amazing.
Related: So, what do we call Caitlyn Jenner now?
Here are some of the highlights from the story, as told to Buzz Bissinger for Vanity Fair.
1. Has Caitlyn had genital surgery?
No. She has clearly had sizable breast implants, but according to Vanity Fair, Jenner chose not to have surgery on her genitals.
2. Is Caitlyn now living full-time as a woman?
Yes. “Bruce always had to tell a lie. He was always living that lie. Every day he always had a secret from morning to night.
“Caitlyn doesn’t have any secrets. Soon as the Vanity Fair cover comes out, I’m free,” Jenner said.
Watch Jenner’s shoot with Annie Leibovitz here…
She told Bissinger that during publicity appearances after winning an Olympic gold medal, that “underneath my suit I have a bra and pantyhose and this and that and thinking to myself, ‘They know nothing about me… Little did they know I was totally empty inside.’
“I’m not doing this to be interesting. I’m doing this to live,” Jenner told Vanity Fair.
3. So Caitlyn is a ‘she’, NOT a ‘he’?
Absolutely. But she might give you a short grace period to get used to it. “I don’t really get hung up. A guy came in the other day and I was fully dressed — it’s just habit, I said, ‘Hi, Bruce here,’ and I went, Oh fuck, it ain’t Bruce, I was screwing up doing it.”
Related: The mistake not to make when talking about Caitlyn Jenner today.
4. How did they keep the Vanity Fair cover a secret?
With a lot of effort. “Well, my poor office thought we were doing Barbra Streisand! I just couldn’t think of anyone tall…” stylist Jessica Diehl says in her own publication Vanity Fair, about prepping the shoot.
“I should have said Rene Russo, who I think [Caitlyn] looks like more anyway. The secrecy, I have to say, had a lot to do with being discreet and shopping — a lot of which we did online. We talked to no one. Literally, the people here at Vanity Fair did not know.”
According to a recent New York Times feature on Kris Jenner, the Jenner/Kardashians are very au fait with media strategies and had no difficulty keeping the secret.
“Bruce has no privacy; none of them do. That’s the deal [the family] made with one another. When they’re silent on Bruce, they aren’t protecting him from the judgements of a cruel world; they are protecting Bruce’s exclusive. That’s the deal they made with one another,” wrote Taffy Brodesser-Akner.
5. Why the corset?
Caitlyn planned the shoot with stylist Diehl with some very specific inspiration in mind. “She’s all-American in so many ways. She has certain ideas about what she feels great in. But those ideas are still forming and taking shape. There will be some experimentation and trying things. Welcome to the world of women’s fashion! She has a fantastic physique. It’s just a totally well-taken-care-of physique,” said Diehl.
But it wasn’t supposed to be sexy. “There was a stripped-down idea there that sort of felt like underneath all of this excitement and newsworthiness is the soul of a woman,” Diehl said. “And that didn’t need a lot of covering up. It was not meant to be risqué in any way. It was really meant to sort of show with all honesty and purity, ‘This is what is going on. Here I am.'”
6. How are Caitlyn’s six kids handling it all?
Jenner’s children from her first two marriages — Burt, 36, Cassandra, 34, Brandon, 33 and Brody, 31, described an “insensitive father” who was “absent for years at a time.”
“I have high hopes that Caitlyn is a better person than Bruce. I’m very much looking forward to that,” Burt Jenner told Bissinger.
Read more: Meet Caitlyn Jenner. Vanity Fair reveals the woman formerly known as Bruce Jenner.
Daughter Cassandra met Caitlyn for the first time at a “girls’ night” Jenner hosted.
“I was just nervous that I wouldn’t make her feel comfortable,” Cassandra told Bissinger. “I was worried I wouldn’t say the right things or act the right way or seem relaxed.”
But as Caitlyn, Jenner was able to communicate with her eldest daughter better than ever before.
“We talked more than we ever have. We could just be girls together,” Cassandra said.
The Jenner children have eschewed financial gain from their father’s transition and won’t be participating in her new E! reality series. Jenner said she was initially “terribly disappointed and terribly hurt” by their decision.
7. Is Caitlyn doing a reality show of her own?
Of course. “‘Oh, she’s doing a stupid reality show. She’s doing it for the money. She’s doing this, she’s doing that,'” Jenner told Bissinger she anticipates critics will say.
“I’m not doing it for money. I’m doing it to help my soul and help other people. If I can make a dollar, I certainly am not stupid. [I have] house payments and all that kind of stuff. I will never make an excuse for something like that. Yeah, this is a business. You don’t go out and change your gender for a television show. O.K., it ain’t happening. I don’t care who you are.”
Watch the evolution of Caitlyn Jenner…
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Top Comments
I'm so happy for Caitlyn. Not only would it be incredibly hard to live your whole life trapped in the wrong body, but to then come out to your family and the whole world is just phenomenal. She has so much strength to be able to do so and I hope that her amazing actions lead to more people coming out and being the true people they are. All the best Caitlyn! :)
Her children already have a mother, she fathered those children, providing sperm so can't be labelled a mother.